I personally prefer Postfix. However, I believe that people that love to administer Exim mail servers will have as good mail servers as people that love to administer Postfix setups. But yeah, I prefer from far Postfix to Exim. I just love how it is structured and well built.

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"Any intelligent fool can make things bigger, more complex, and more violent. It takes a touch of genius -- and a lot of courage -- to move in the opposite direction."

# Why is Sendmail included, it is "known insecure"?!
Sendmail has had an imperfect security record, however the Sendmail authors and maintainers have been very receptive to reworking their code to make it much more secure (and this is a sadly uncommon response). The recent security history of Sendmail is not much different than some of the supposedly "more secure" alternatives.
# Why isn't Postfix included?
The license is not free, and thus can not be considered.
# Why isn't qmail or djbdns included?
Neither program is what many Unix users "expect" out of a mail or DNS application.

Good enough for me although I probably would use postfix or qmail if I had to spend a lot of time with such a program.

Query: If your email provider has an smtp server (i.e., smtp.myemail.com), do you still need an MTA (i.e., sendmail) to send email if you use a basic MUA like mutt? Would you need one (i.e., fetchmail) to get mail if you have a pop server?

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And the WORD was made flesh, and dwelt among us. (John 1:14)

Query: If your email provider has an smtp server (i.e., smtp.myemail.com), do you still need an MTA (i.e., sendmail) to send email if you use a basic MUA like mutt? Would you need one (i.e., fetchmail) to get mail if you have a pop server?

The newest Mutt has built in SMTP so you do not need sandmail. The stable one doesn't have so you will need to configure sendmail to send mail to your IP mail server which will relay it further. I am not using Mutt so I do not know if it has built in support for downloading mails from POP3 and IMAP servers. If I have to guess I think it has it. If it doesn't have you will have to use fetchmail to get your mail from the remote mail server of your IP. You do want to use IMAP and SMTP only with TSL or SSL.

The newest Mutt has built in SMTP so you do not need sandmail. The stable one doesn't have so you will need to configure sendmail to send mail to your IP mail server which will relay it further. I am not using Mutt so I do not know if it has built in support for downloading mails from POP3 and IMAP servers. If I have to guess I think it has it. If it doesn't have you will have to use fetchmail to get your mail from the remote mail server of your IP. You do want to use IMAP and SMTP only with TSL or SSL.

I would not use POP3 period.

Cheers,
OKO

Thanks, that answered my question.

Why wouldn't you use POP3?

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And the WORD was made flesh, and dwelt among us. (John 1:14)

Ah, that could be a security risk! I did not know that. I just went with the flow and used the ever popular pop3 - don't even know if any of my email accounts support IMAP (but, I will check with my web hosting company, since that account is where I'm trying to get all my various email accounts consolidated into).

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And the WORD was made flesh, and dwelt among us. (John 1:14)

Ah, that could be a security risk! I did not know that. I just went with the flow and used the ever popular pop3 - don't even know if any of my email accounts support IMAP (but, I will check with my web hosting company, since that account is where I'm trying to get all my various email accounts consolidated into).

I've never really understood the purpose of using IMAP/POP over SSL/TLS. For authentication, sure, but for the actual data transfer? What's the point? The messages travelled over plaintext SMTP between how many different SMTP servers, routers, and other networking gear? And are stored in plaintext on how many systems? And are stored on the ISP/destination server in plaintext for how long? Why encrypt the last connection only?

I've never really understood the purpose of using IMAP/POP over SSL/TLS. For authentication, sure, but for the actual data transfer? What's the point? The messages travelled over plaintext SMTP between how many different SMTP servers, routers, and other networking gear? And are stored in plaintext on how many systems? And are stored on the ISP/destination server in plaintext for how long? Why encrypt the last connection only?

Why do you want to send message in the plain text? How about signed and encrypted message

Exactly. So, if your message is signed and encrypted, why would you need POP-over-SSL or IMAP-over-SSL?

POPS (POP3S?) and IMAPS never made sense to me, as a message-transfer protocol. Unless the entire communications channel, from end-point to end-point, is encrypted, then there is very little value in encrypting the final leg of a message's journey.

On groupware systems where messages tend to remain within the system (internal messages), then secure server-client connections like IMAPS make sense. But for general "sending over the Internet" setups? Not really. At least not in my mind.

That's like driving a tank from home to work, then jumping on a 10-speed bike to travel from work to the mall, then jumping on a bus to travel from the mall to the grocery store, then hitch-hiking from the grocery store back to work, then jumping back in the tank to drive home. Sure, the home-to-work leg of the trip is super-secure, but what about the rest of the journey??

For example, if you want to eavesdrop on me, then the easiest way to do so is to listen on the pop3/imap/smtp traffic from my computer to the main server/MTA.
If pop3s/imaps/smtps are used, this will be much harder.

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UNIX was not designed to stop you from doing stupid things, because that would also stop you from doing clever things.

For example, if you want to eavesdrop on me, then the easiest way to do so is to listen on the pop3/imap/smtp traffic from my computer to the main server/MTA.
If pop3s/imaps/smtps are used, this will be much harder.

It seems that most consumer email systems (at least the ones I've dealt with) only use POP3 (and some IMAP) - unless they are using pop3s/imaps and just not saying so in their documentation.

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And the WORD was made flesh, and dwelt among us. (John 1:14)